Economist

WRITING a budget should be about imposing order. In America, it frequently causes chaos. By letting funding for the federal government lapse on January 20th, Congress demonstrated, again, how hard it is for it to approve spending. The disruption might be worth it if America’s budget showdowns led to better policy. But they do not. Budget-making does not bring income and outlays into line. It does not allow lawmakers much opportunity to weigh competing claims on resources. And it fails to m...

KENTUCKY, a poor, rural state nostalgic for coal, has never been quite sure of its politics. For three years it was the darling of Obamacare. Governor Steve Beshear, a rare Appalachian Democrat, complied with the reform by creating a statewide health-insurance exchange and expanding Medicaid (governmen...

WHEN plans for the Museum of the Bible, which opens to the public in Washington, DC on November 18th, were first unveiled many predicted it would be a big, glossy advertisement for fundamentalist Christianity. The museum was founded and part-funded by Steve Green, a prominent evangelical and president of Hobby Lobby, a chain...

CONGRESS seldom agrees on health care, as is shown by the Republicans’ fruitless attempts to rip up the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. A longtime exception to partisan feuds was the Children’s Health Insurance Programme (CHIP), established in 1997. The scheme, which covers some 9m American children...

ON OCTOBER 25th the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its score of the Bipartisan Health Care Stabilisation Act, the cross-party effort by two senators, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patty Murray of Washington, to shore up troubled health-insurance markets. The main goal of this bill is to restore, for two years,...

INSURANCE is supposed to be about the careful management of risk. Recently, for America’s health insurers, it has had a lot to do with keeping track of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. On October 12th the White House announced that it would cut off payments to insurers that underpin parts of the ...

THE strange thing about Donald Trump’s new executive actions on health care is the identity of those who will suffer their consequences. On October 12th Mr Trump kicked off a deregulatory process to permit widespread formation of so-called Association Health Plans (AHPs), insurance policies run by groups of small firms. Then...

AFTER Republicans failed to agree on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act earlier this year, the cause of Obamacare repeal looked dead. Yet a revival was always possible before September 30th, when a budget measure allowing a health bill to pass the Senate with only 51 votes, rather than 60, expires. The ticking clock has spurred four Republican senators, led by Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to have one last stab at getting a bill passed.

GOVERNORS of Kansas tend to love their job and rarely leave it early. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, dithered before agreeing to leave the governor’s mansion after Barack Obama asked her to lead the introduction of the Affordable Care Act as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The current Republican governor, Sam Brown...

NOT long ago, America’s health-insurance markets seemed to be drying up. In June 49 counties lacked any willing providers for the “individual market”, which serves 18m Americans who are not covered by an employer or the government. The Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s health-c...

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